I have two building under .25 miles apart with LOS. I need as much throughput as possible with fault tolerance. This is my proposed hardware list.

2 x RB433AH Boards
6 x Ubiquiti XR5s (5.8 Ghz)
6 x 5.8 GHz ISM / UNII Band 17 dBi Backfire Wireless LAN Antennas (Parabolic w/radome)

Thoughts:
I would have 2 links set at horizontal polariy and the third set at vertical. I would like enable bonding for all three links however some ppl are recommending Nstreme, if I use Nstreme, would I have to switch out the Ubiquitis for Mikrotiks? How much space should the physical antennas be from each other on the towers. I've even considered makeing one of the horizontal links into a third seperate plarity, like circular or diagnal, or even a completely different frequency, but I would like to avoid this. Any input will be greatly appreciated.

XR5 and those antennas are to powerfull for that distance...you throw away money, you could use 19dBi pannels and R52, its cheaper and you get the same results. You can use 5200, 5400 and 5800. Leave 1m between antennas.

Ok, I've changed my recipe a bit here is the new plan...

2 x RB433AH Boards
4 x Mikrotik R52s (5.8 Ghz)
4 x Pacific Wireless 24dBi 5.8GHz Panel Antennas

My Thoughts:
I was actually have second thoughts on my first plan almost right away. I removed the third link because I just realized remembered that the RB433AH is ONLY 10/100. The only good I can see throwin a third link would be additional fault tolerance, unless anyone else can think of another benefit. Does anyone know if I can get away with bonding the wlan card directly on the RB433AH or do I have to buy additional router board and bond them seperately? Some ppl are buying seperate main boards and radios and then bonding them on a dedicated mikrotik routerboard, what else beside a slightly increased throughput will this gain you?

I would still go with the 17dbi backfires. They are much easier to aim and look a lot tidier. They are also less susceptible to being blown about.

jknudsen -

The backfire antenna is a good antenna - so are most of the 23/24db 5ghz antennas out there - so either selection will probably work just fine for you.


As to bonding.... I have a couple of bonded setups running. I tried nstreme and nstreme dual..... I am not happy about the throughput on nstreme dual. Single nstreme 'channels' (if you will) seem to perform better. Too bad as I had 'big' plans on using nstreme dual. You can use single nstreme channels on each card, then bond the interfaces via EoIP. This will give you the best of both worlds - Nstreme and fault tolerence (using rr on the bonded interfaces). No need to use L2PT for bonding - just use the 'standard' EoIP tunnel setup, and any encryption method you want on the Nstreme interfaces and you'll be fine.

R/

I removed the third link because I just realized remembered that the RB433AH is ONLY 10/100. T

you can bond 2xLAN and get 400mbps full duplex. Dont forget thet on 3 wireless links you can get 150mbps and a single LAN port has 200mbps in full duplex!

jknudsen -

150Mbps is a dream - the RBs cannot push that much data across a wireless tcp link under even the best circumstances.

I have run at least 50 different configs trying to get 100Mbps across a radio set pair. When I used Nstreme and bonding with 4 wireless interfaces at each end I was finally able to achieve that goal. I can do it with 3 if I have turbo-channels available.

50Mbps is the theoretical throughput on a single wireless card in turbo mode - this is not ACTUAL throughput. If you search around the forum you'll see that several folks have tried this same thing and the results I have gotten pretty much mirrors their's.

It is a combination of CPU power, wireless protocols (timing), CCQ, and tcp overhead.

Take it for what it's worth.

R/

what are you talking about man? Offcourse you can get 150mbps on wireless with RB433. 3x50mbps how much do you think it is? Its not about one wireless link, it's about 3 links!!! And i have 55mbps TCP trafic on one wireless link and you can search the forum and you will see i'm not the only one.
Now watch and cry. And remember that a FTP transfer is faster than btest. And pay attention to the CPU usage, it's only 24% so 150mbps is possible.The pictures are from a bridge between an RB411 and a 1Ghz P3.
And galaxynet try harder.

InoX -
I am talking about serious transfer rates...yes I know you can get 50Mbps with a single tubo channel and Nstreme - in ONE direction - I've done it pleny of times. You can also get about 70Mbps using only UDP - so what? I even duplicated MT's 300Mbps setup in my lab. But what the challege is to do that in the real world... I have been an RF enginner for 30+ years and been involved with telecommunications the entire time - I even worked as an RF consultant for Diamond Multimedia and Cisco at one time. I think I have a good handle on the RF side and as far as computers go...well I cut my teeth on the old IBM 360 main frames back in the 1970's and have been on computers, mainframes and 'personal' computers these past 30 years as well.

I don't use bandwidth test, I use 3ghz desktops with multi-link software to open multiple connections to get maximum transfer rates on each side past the MT boxes, so all the MT wireless had to do was route the info.... I use the same software to check my wired connections and get damn near 1gb across a gigbit network with this setup - so it's not the test software or the cpus.

If you put multiple cards in an MT setup (whether an RB or a PC w/ROS installed) in the 'wild' you'll see what I mean...you don't get 50Mbps per card that rate gets slower. You check the forum and you'll see what I mean.

hi, i have a question for you getting about 50mbits tcp.... can you do the same test with 64bytes packet?

and tell us how many packets per second are you pushing trhoug this link??

thanks

last time when i have tried to do a 64bytes test one of the RB411 has frozen (i was able to reset through the wlan, the lan was down). The link goes through 3xRB411. As I remeber it was stuck at about 25.000pps and 18mbps. This month I will install an RB433 with 3 high speed/traffic links and I will post the results. I hope that galaxynet is wrong

thanks inox!

25.000 is a good number.. 433ah i´m waiting some of them with r52 , for try making a 50mbits fdx!

InoX -

This is not a competition to me - if you can get it to work & work well then I'd like to see the config as I could use the extra speed myself. My experience is that once you to start to load traffic in both directions the whole thing slows down. Add bonding on top of that (with bondingrr for instant failover) and the cpu has it's hands full.....

But like I said - if you can get it to work well, I'd be interested!!
R/

Thom

Hi,

I tested the RB411AH 5 minutes ago and it seams with it I can reach 42Mbps full duplex in UDP and 35 in UDP, with bonding and nstreme..

To have 150 Mbps in real world.. you need more than 3 links. I think.

I was surprised with the rb411AH.. is very fast.


Martín.